One of the sites most closely correlated with transactional sex is the city streets, as seen in the use of the English term ‘streetwalker’ for prostitute. Similarly, it is well documented that early modern literature conventionally correlates female mobility with sexual availability, transmuting any woman using public space into a mujer pública or ‘public woman’, synonymous with whore. Like the terms ‘public woman’ or ‘streetwalker’, many euphemisms for and descriptors used to categorize prostitutes associate spatial mobility with sexual availability; examples include the English words ‘tramp’ and ‘harlot’, the latter of which derives from the Old French herlot or arlot, ‘vagabond’ or wanderer. Enriqueta Zafra demonstrates the intertextual references in La pícara Justina, and by extension many of the female picaresque tales, to the proverb ‘Ir romera y volver ramera’ [She who goes wandering comes back a whore], that reveal the cultural association of female spatial movement with sexual deviance. Yet although the pícaras are wandering women, they are not true denizens of public space, but rather foray from a housed position; even in the case of the pícara Justina, Justina periodically returns to her patriarchal household in order to plot her next foray.

The sixteenth century has been identified by several critical theorists as a time when the notion of privacy or private space emerges, defining women as naturally inclined toward domesticity and interiority, and thereby implicitly defining mobile women as unnatural. On the other hand, over the past few decades, feminist critics have questioned the validity of a dichotomous distinction between public and private. Public space is not, and never has been, a neutral entity that can be equally accessed by all members of society, but rather is a contested ground that is often used to regulate gender and sexuality. To give but one example, the term ‘public man’ generally denotes a statesman whereas, as previously noted, ‘public woman’ designates a prostitute. Prostitution is a locus at which the distinction between public and private breaks down since transactional sex is an act that takes place in private space, yet must often be advertised in public unless it takes place from a fixed and publicly known location such as a brothel.